“Objects flew out the hole where the window had been, and passengers right next to her were holding onto her.

“And meanwhile, there was blood all over this man’s hands. He was tending to her.

“We could feel the air from the outside coming in, and then we had smoke kind of coming in the window.

“Meanwhile, you have passengers that were in that aisle, trying to attend to the woman that was bleeding from the window explosion.

“That was just chaos all around.”

FlightRadar24 posted this breakdown of the flight(Image: Twitter/@flightradar24)

Passengers thanked the crew members on board for saving their lives(Image: Copyright unknown)

Mr Martinez streamed a brief Facebook Live video with the caption “Something is wrong with our plane! It appears we are going down! Emergency landing!! Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas!!”

He said he was sitting two rows behind the window that was broken mid-flight.

“Her [the woman’s] arms and her body were sucked, like sucked in that direction, from my vantage point,” he said.

“So you see people, from the back of the seat, holding onto her, you know, trying to keep her contained.”

He said other passengers were trying to patch the hole in the plane.

“People in the other rows are – just trying to plug the hole, which sounds ridiculous, because you know people are using jackets and things, and it’s just being sucked right out,” he told CNN.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt confirmed the fatality during a press conference(Image: CBS Philly)

The Fire Commissioner of Philadelphia, when asked by reporters if SW Airlines 1380 was in a “free fall” as described by some passengers on social media, referred the question to the NSTB but added during an emergency landing descent “happens in a fairly rapid manner”.

Flight information provided by FlightRadar24 showed the plane went from approximately 30,000 feet to 13,000 feet in five minutes.

The entire descent took approximately 15 minutes.

Depressurisation is believed to have caused the woman to be sucked through the broken window.

“One passenger, a woman, was partially drawn out towards the outside of the plane and was pulled back in by other passengers,” Todd Baur, the father of one passenger said.